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Cox doesn’t believe that there are any artistic categories that can be defined by sex, but that there has been an absence of women choreographers in contemporary ballet. At a mini-choreographic confab hosted by Pointe Magazine editor Virginia Johnson, there was general agreement by those who attended that there has even been a degree of exclusion by companies.

With every bill BX has tried to expand their specific niche in Philly of contemporary classical and this was no different. Cox and Neenan couldn’t have chosen two better collaborators than Frankfurt Ballet’s Helen Pickett and Scapino Ballet’s Annabella Lopez Ochoa and tap another vein in BX‘s expanding rep.

Tara Keating opens in Pickett’s piece ‘Union,’ with a sinewy prologue, that could double as an introduction for BX‘s signature brand- Keating stepping out of the darkness in a flesh bikini for a steely solo moving with hypnotic invertebrate fluidity one second and powerfully into a diamond- hard arabesque the next. The luminous Keating tosses- off liberated balletic expressionism that is both concrete and abstract. The ballet is scored to contemporary chamber music by Bernd Sippel.

Francis Veyette, bare-chested, takes over the stage for his solo until Keating, mid-phrase, bathed in cobalt light, appears for their simmering pas de duex that is intimate past eroticism. Pickett’s pas de quatrain with Rosalia Chann, Ja’Malik, Vincent McCloskey and Emily Wagner have the men in a caporiea adagio duet the women in agitated double tempo phrases. They all partner in a free dance section to Sippel’s cello movement and their bodies seem to embody the bowing. Picket’s unfussy theatricality looks great on this company.

Cox expanded a work from 2001’s Shut Up and Dance AIDS benefit called ‘Numb Roads.’ The ballet reflects on being single in a world of expected couplehood that sets up three duets to the trip-hop music of Portishead.

Bookended by the banjo lullaby , each couple in their own spot to express the dynamic, pro and con, of their relationship. The highlight is Meredith Rainey and Emily Wagner’s stellar intricate lift sequences that keep moving. At one point Wagner drops laterally off pointe and another their bodies keep evolving, with Wagner in a precarious inverted split lift that drew gasps. Cox inserts kneeled and sliding pointe work for the women and daring dedans kicks for the men, display the technical level of these dancers.
 

Ochoa’s corker Still@Life, scored to Bach, has the company in humorous phrasings that have them in comedic body clusters and friezes with bodies fragmented and limbs sticking out like thorns. Momentarily derivative of Jiri Kylian’s ‘Petite Mort’ in style, Ochoa’s is otherwise inventive in both her dance comedy that frames otherwise powerful movement.

Scored to Bach, the baroque and biblical themes are inspired by Ochoa’s impressions and animations of Michaelangelo’s figures from his Sistine Chapel. The dancers are initially dressed in black pleated skirts and tight men’s vests. As the piece progresses they take on vibrantly colored skirts and tops. The symbol of the still life is the apple and a game of who has the apple turns into everyone having the apple for more dance hijinks. Love those gargoyle faces mockingly punctuating the music and some revealing some dance rough housing going on with meaningful pushing and shoving.

The dancers pass apples mouth to mouth and some very structured dancing amok ensues with some pretty fancy biting going on. Veyette leads the men out for a male roundelay, skirts atwirl en l’ airy.